Critical Essay | Critical Review by Peter B. Erickson

Critical Review by Peter B. Erickson

SOURCE: Erickson, Peter B. Review of Shakespeare's Division of Experience, by Marilyn French. Women's Studies 9 (1982): 189-201.

In the following review, Erickson criticizes French's flawed examination of gender divisions in the works of William Shakespeare in Shakespeare's Division of Experience.

Of the host of critics cited by Marilyn French, her deepest affinity is with Leslie Fiedler. Like its precursor The Stranger in Shakespeare, French's book [Shakespeare's Division of Experience] begins by analyzing men's perturbed relations with women in the Henry VI plays and ends by noting the evacuation from The Tempest of the dangerous sexuality represented by Venus and Cupid (IV, i, 86-101). French, like Fiedler, concentrates on the twin themes of male “sex nausea” and denigration of women. The two motifs connect because the male point of view identifies women with the physical and holds them accountable for its depredations: displaced from the male body and projected exclusively...
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